My Life as a Wrestler

Saturday, February 28, 2015

It seems every day that we
are confronted with news of horrible acts of terror and destruction perpetrated
by people who claim to follow God.For months now groups like ISIS and Boko Haram have captured global
attention with their sadistic version of Islam that has led them to brutally
execute and enslave people of various groups, even other Muslims.But it’s not just Islamic extremists
who are engaging in violence in the name of God.I just read a heartbreaking article today about Christianmilitias in the Central African Republic who are engaging in brutal acts
against Muslims to the extent that there are now 50,000 Muslims who are fleeing
the country rather than face being hacked up with machetes by Christians.

Here in America
Evangelicals are more and more frequently calling for the U.S. to wage war
against ISIS.This week I watched
a video clip from Pastor Robert Jefress, Dallas First Baptist, who somehow
twisted the teachings of Jesus on being salt and light into a justification of
why we need to go to war in the name of Jesus.

While I agree with the
desire to protect the innocent and to stand up to evil, I am very disturbed by
how easily American Christians are willing to appeal to Jesus as a
justification to use violence against other religious groups.It seems to me that as much as American
Evangelicals may hate what ISIS is doing, their answer as to how to deal with
ISIS is simply to answer violence with violence, hate with hate, and destruction
with destruction, and all of this from the moral high ground that God is on OUR
side.Though this way of
responding to tyrannical groups may make sense in terms of national defense, this
position cannot be defended by way of the example or teachings of Jesus.

As New Testament Scholar
Richard Hays has noted,

“From Matthew to Revelation
we find a consistent witness against violence and a calling to the community to
follow the example of Jesus in accepting suffering rather than inflicting it …
Nowhere does the New Testament provide any positive model of Jesus or his
followers employing violence in defense of justice.”

I am becoming more and more
convinced that much of what is called Christianity in modern America is little
more than tribalism, nationalism, and patriotism covered in a “Christian”
veneer.This type of Christianity
doesn’t show forth the good news of the gospel rooted in enemy love,
forgiveness, peacemaking and reconciliation but instead keeps recycling the
same old story of retributive violence.

N.T. Wright has noted that
humans become like the god(s) they worship.When I look at religiously motivated violence whether
Christian, Jewish, or Islamic I see that under the surface they all have in
common a vision a violent, retributive God who is “on our side” against others.It takes nothing to believe in a
violent and retributive god who is on our side.Why? Because he looks just like us!

But Jesus reveals the God who
is utterly different than anything we could come up with.In Jesus we see "God with
us", the God who will step into our world and get his hands dirty, the one
who taught us to love our enemies, to seek peace, to show mercy and compassion
to the sick, poor, and those living on the margins of society. In the cross of
Christ we see the overthrow of the vindictive and violent picture of God as
Jesus prays with his dying breath "Father forgive them, they don't even
know what they are doing." As
the author of Hebrews wrote, “[We come to] Jesus the
mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better
word than the blood of Abel” (Hebrews 12:24.) The blood of Abel is at the
foundation of civilization crying out for vengeance but the blood of Christ,
the Lamb slain at the foundation of the world, announces forgiveness.This is the good news!

Isn’t it interesting that the most
prolific writer in the New Testament was a former religious, fundamentalist
terrorist? Before his encounter with Jesus, Paul had terrorized the early
church through persecution and even lethal force.Imagine Paul’s shock when he bumped into Jesus on the Road
to Damascus, realizing that rather than fighting for God he was actually
fighting God himself.Paul would
never again see violence as a legitimate way to live out his faith because the
image of God behind his worship had been radically changed.Paul went on to spend of much of the
rest of his life being persecuted and imprisoned for his faith in Jesus, but
even in persecution he did not resist or fight back but rather followed the
example of Jesus to the very end.

The question of how to deal with ISIS is
a tricky one, especially for those of us who follow Christ and live here in the
west with no fear of persecution. While I do not know what we should do
concerning ISIS, I do know religiously motivated violence from Christians will
not bring about the righteousness of God.

Friday, February 06, 2015

Yesterday President Obama spoke at the National Prayer
Breakfast and within no time various political sites/blogs were already
condemning his words, or should I say about 50 of his words.Here are the “inflammatory” words for
which he has been criticized:

“Lest we get on our high horse and think that this
(religious violence) is unique to some other place, remember that during the
crusades and the inquisitions people committed terrible deeds in the name of
Christ… In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow was all too often justified
in the name of Christ.”

All day I have seen one anti-Obama post after another on
Facebook about how the violence perpetrated by Christians in the Crusades was
not nearly as bad as what Muslims did, and that Christian violence during the
Crusades was at least justified. In
other words, “our religious violence is better than your religious violence.”

But the truth is that Christians did commit some horrible
acts of violence during the Crusades and the inquisitions not to mention what
“Christians” have done in this country towards Native Americans and African
slaves among others.Have Muslims
done horrible things in the name of their religion?Yes, and certain extremists are committing horrible
atrocities to this day.Religious
violence, no matter what brand, is wrong!

I watched the controversial clip of President Obama from the
prayer breakfast and honestly couldn’t find anything in that clip with which I
remotely disagreed.So I decided
to watch the entire speech from the prayer breakfast for context thinking that
I must have missed something.To
my surprise President Obama spent most of his speech condemning religious acts
of violence and calling for humility in how we live out our faith.His closing wordswere a call to practice the teaching of
Jesus from Matthew 7:12 “Do unto others what you would have them do to
you.”

I did not vote for Obama nor do I support many of his
policies, but these latest attacks on him for condemning religious violence and
calling for humility are truly disheartening.I highly recommend that folks watch the entire speech from
the prayer breakfast instead of getting a 30 second sound byte spun by
political blogs/news sites, and see if you really think his speech was as crazy
as it is being made out to be.

Thursday, January 02, 2014

Here we find ourselves at the beginning of another new year
and the time when we resolve to be better people for the coming year.So often we come into the New Year
longing to change—a longing that is helped because it often comes with a few
added pounds from the holidays, credit card bills from the Christmas season,
and a workout routine that has been sufficiently interrupted to be
nonexistent.And so we decide to
be different people because we think that it is just a matter of making the
choice to change.But at some
point in adult life we finally come to terms with our inability to change
ourselves and thus we resolve to never make New Year’s resolutions again.After all who needs to add the
self-loathing that comes with breaking resolutions to the long list of things
to change about oneself.

But I wonder if one of the reasons we are so lousy at
actually keeping these resolutions is because we give very little attention to
changing the context of our lives.We deal with our unhealthy behaviors as people trying to solve the
problem of weeds with a weed-eater, cutting away at the top without ever
getting down to the roots.

I heard it said a once that we are inter-dividuals.As much as we might like to think we are
not isolated individuals but rather people connected and formed by our
relationships with others.It is
these relationships more than anything else that constitute the context of our
lives.Groups like Alcoholics
Anonymous figured this out a long time ago.Recovery in AA isn’t about pulling oneself up by the boot-straps
and trying harder not to drink but rather working on recovery in a community of
people in recovery.The alcoholic
who swears off drinking and commits to sobriety on his own will rarely make it
very far, but the one who joins a community of recovery and gets a sponsor is
on a much better path to freedom because, with the help of others, he will be
getting at the root issues that manifest in addictive behavior.

One of my resolutions for last year was to write more songs.In the last couple of years I have not
written as many songs in the past and really wanted to see things change.Looking back on last year I realize
that it was one of my most prolific years of song-writing in a long time.So why all the new songs?I believe it is because rather than
simply trying to write more songs I changed the relational context of my life.For me this meant being a part of an
online songwriting group as well as setting aside more time for working on
songs with others in person.The
reality is that most of the songs I wrote didn’t happen within the songwriting
group yet being a part of a community that was working to create new songs kept
me more attuned to the gift of songwriting within me.What’s more is that I saw an improvement not only in
quantity of songs but also in the quality of songs I wrote.

New Year’s resolutions aren’t bad but I think we can start
in a better place to experience real change in the coming year.So here’s a few ideas on a different
way to approach resolutions that gets more at the context of life rather than
behavior modification. Instead of resolving to run 3 times a week, try
resolving to build relationships with folks who are runners.Resolve to find a community of runners
of which you can be a part.Instead of resolving to get out of debt, resolve to make time in your
life to build relationships with others who are currently working to live
debt-free.Instead of resolving to
be a better husband or wife, resolve as a couple to spend time in the coming
year with people who have walked through tough times in their marriage and who
love each other. I think these
types of resolutions have the potential to help create a healthy context in
which good things can grow.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

“Repent” is a word that I can’t help but hear in my head
with an angry southern accent.This no doubt goes back to a few brief months I spent attending a
fundamentalists Baptist school in Midland Texas during my sixth grade
year.I had begged my parents to
let me go to a Christian school thinking that it would help me in my growing
faith, because at that time I had felt the call of God to become a preacher
when I grew up.Those few months
at that school proved otherwise.Rather than help me into a deeper relationship with God they exposed me
to a rigid fundamentalist religion that had me in detention nearly every day of
the week for the smallest of offenses (one time I got detention for mentioning
the band The Beatles in a conversation).One of the regularly scheduled gatherings at that school was a chapel
service that frequently featured preachers who would describe in morbid detail
the horrors of hell that awaited anyone who did not say the sinner’s prayer.So week after week I would hear
“repent!”As a sixth grader I
didn’t have a very big list of sins of which to repent but I got “saved” every week
because wanted to make sure I didn’t end up in hell.Looking back I see that my initial
understanding of repentance was not very conducive to following Jesus or spiritual
growth because it was entirely rooted in fear.

I suspect that many in our world share a similar aversion to
this popular idea of repentance.But what if repentance was actually something different.I have come to believe that it is and
that in fact our ideas of repentance need to repent and come to Jesus.

In the parable of the Prodigal Son we see the classical
picture of repentance:

17 “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How
many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving
to death! 18 I will set out and go back to my father and say to
him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19 I am
no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired
servants.’ 20 So he got up and went to his father. (Luke 15:17-20).

The younger son had squandered everything that the father
had given him.He had followed the
path of sinful living to its destructive conclusion.Destitute, hungry and tired he came to his senses and
remembered his father.The Greek
word for repentance – metanoia means to rethink or reconsider.The younger son began to reconsider his
life as contrasted to life in the father’s house and began the long journey of
returning home no doubt wondering how he was going to get back in his father’s
good graces. "I’m not worthy to be
called his son, maybe he will let me have a job where I can work to pay my
debts off.Maybe I can at least
survive better there than I am now."

I think most of us turn to the Lord in this way.We see where our choices have led
us.We see how we have hurt
ourselves and let others down.Yet
this first stage of repentance isn’t based on our love for the Father but
rather the mess we’ve made of our lives.While this is an important part of rethinking our lives it is certainly
not the end of repentance because what we read next in the story dismantles all
of our preconceived ideas of God as being punitive, angry, or even willing to
let us work for his blessings.

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him
and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms
around him and kissed him.21 “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned
against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’22 “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick!
Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on
his feet. 23 Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a
feast and celebrate. 24 For this son of mine was dead and is alive
again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate. (Luke 15:21-24)

This father was not interested in the son’s idea of hiring
him as a servant and doesn’t even seem interested in acknowledging his remorse
over how he had wasted everything the father gave him.The father showed a scandalous mercy
towards the wayward son.He
reconciled him instantly with all of the privileges of being a son, and not
only that but with a party, barbecue and a band.And this is precisely where a whole other type of rethinking (repentance) is going to be required of the son.

After the reconciliation to the father and the community,
after the long night of celebration, when the music has faded and the last
scraps of smoked meat have been cleaned from the tables this son will now have
to learn a new way of life based on the father’s love.Thus begins the life-long journey of
repentance, the continued rethinking of everything based on the new reality of
being reconciled and in relationship with the father.This second stage of repentance is not about
self-preservation or objectifying the father to get his blessings but rather
being ruthless with every thought and action within that stands against the
truth of God’s reconciling love.

The book of Acts recounts the apostle Paul’s
conversion.He was riding on the
road to Damascus to persecute followers of Jesus when he actually bumped into the risen Lord.The Jesus he met on that
road was not vindictive or punitive but rather the God of grace and truth.Jesus lets him in on the fact that
while Paul had been thinking that he was fighting for God all of those years he
was actually fighting God himself.Like the younger son, Paul re-though the path that he was on and embraced Christ.What we see in the writings
of Paul throughout the New Testament is the continual rethinking of everything in
the world in the light of Jesus and the kingdom of God: relationships, culture, social order, government, etc.

Why is it that we so often limit repentance to a one time
act, a prayer, or an altar call at the end of a service.True repentance must involved
rethinking everything in our lives from politics to sex to business to how we
see others and ourselves in the light of the resurrected king.It won’t do to get back in the father’s
house if we just go on trying to earn his love because then we will just take up the ways of the older brother who was in the house and every bit as alienated from the father as the younger son had been yet all dressed up in
performance, religion, and objectification.Better to get on believing the outrageously good news of the
gospel and let it free us from everything that has kept us from that reality.

I spent most of my teenage years running, like the prodigal son, from the father's house. When I surrendered to Christ 20 years ago it was much like the young son of that parable. I tried for a few years to work for God, to gain his approval with my discipline and service but as the years went on began to experience a different kind of repentance of which I will never finish 'til I meet Jesus face to face. This repentance has meant that I have had to rethink the way I read the Bible, the way I view justice, the way I treat others, as well as my doctrine, culture and how I engage with the world. This rethinking is scary as I see how attached I am to certain ideas that oppose the ways of Jesus, yet I am held in the midst of it by the ruthless love of Christ in which there is no fear. I know not where all of this rethinking life in the light of Christ will take me, but I suspect I am in good company, because who of those original followers of Christ would have imagined where the master would take them. So here's to rethinking, to repenting, to wrestling through muck and mire with the love and truth of Jesus.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

In the coming weeks I will
be reviewing Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell and the New Jerusalem by
Brad Jersak.While the book
was published back in 2009, I find that many of the questions that it raises are
just beginning to make their way into the public conversations of
Christians.Questions about
eternal destiny—heaven and hell are important because the way we answer them
says much about how we see God and his purposes as well as our place in the
story.

Jersak sees several factors
that contribute to a person’s idea.The first and most obvious is the particular scriptures that a person
wishes to use.Beyond that he
cites 4 other contributing factors:

1.Our View of God:
Is God primarily a God of love, justice, and mercy or righteous anger.

2.Our View of the
Atonement: Was the atonement about final payment for sin-debts or final
forgiveness of sin debts?Does the
cross save us from God, the devil, sin, death, or ourselves?

3.Our Approach to
Scripture: Do we tend to interpretthe images of the Bible literally or metaphorically?Do we feel we are more faithful to the
text when we take it as literally as the language allow or when we are most
sensitive to the author’s use of symbols?

4.Our Personal
Need: Do we feel the need to ignore, minimize, or do away with hell because we
cannot allow that a loving God could conceive, create, or implement such a
monstrosity?Or do we desperately
need hell, because in this world of atrocities, God could not be considered holy,
righteous, and just without it?

Brad Jersak writes as a
former infernalist (believer in conscious eternal torment of hell) who has come
to be biased towards hope.He
writes in the opening chapter:

We
all have a bias.The important
thing is to recognize your bias and be able to defend or explain it.As a “critical realist,” I spend a good
deal of time and energy studying my biases—how they emerged, and how they
influence my thinking.Rather than
pretending to be perfectly objective, I confess that since my early days as a
terrified infernalist, I have developed a strong preference for hope.I hope in the Good News that God’s love
rectifies every injustice through forgiveness and reconciliation.The Gospel of hope that I can preach
boldly is this:

God
is not angry with you and never has been.He loves you with and everlasting love.Salvation is not a question of “Turn or burn.”We’re burning already, but we don’t
have to be!Redemption!The life and death of Christ showed us
how far God would go to extend forgiveness and invitation.His resurrection marked the death of
death and the evacuation of Hades.My hope is in Christ, who rightfully earned his judgment seat and whose
verdict is restorative justice, that is to say, mercy.

…This
book will address the central problem of this “heated” debate: not infernalism
versus annihilationism versus universalism, but rather, authentic, biblical
Christian hope vis-à-vis the error of dogmatic presumption (of any view).Hope presumes nothing but is rooted in
a deeper confidence: the love and mercy of an openhearted and relentlessly kind
God. (P.9-10)

I guess one of the reasons I
found this book so interesting was that it starts from a place of wrestling
through our own beliefs.Many
years ago I began to realize that so many of the things I believed about
Christianity had little or nothing to do with thoughtful and prayerful
reflection on the scriptures but were rather the product of my own baggage: a
mixture of religious, political and economic ideas filtered through the lens of
a middle class American white dude.Few topics come with as much religious baggage as the topic of
hell.We will get into some of
that baggage in later posts but for now I will close with a question.

Think about your own view of
hell.What does your view of hell
say about your view of God?

Monday, April 01, 2013

For so many of the years that I have been a part of church, communion has seemed to be something tacked on to a service, and then only 4-5
times a year.For those in
Protestant evangelical expressions of the church as myself this is pretty
standard.When communion has been
offered, it has usually been either hurried through, or an event of morbid
introspection when a Christian remembers how Christ died for his or her
personal forgiveness of sin.And
while I don’t disagree with the fact that Jesus died for our sins I can’t help
but wonder if Jesus didn’t mean something much, much bigger when he introduced
communion to his disciples during that Passover meal just before he went to the
cross (Luke 22:13-20 .)

Jesus could have achieved the work of Calvary at any point
during the Jewish calendar.Probably the day that would have made the most sense, at least to
Protestant Evangelicals, would have been Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the
most Holy day of the Jewish calendar.Yom Kippur was a national day of atoning for the sins of Israel.It was a day of repentance, fasting,
prayer, and sacrifice.It seems
that the Day of Atonement would have been a better fit for what many Evangelicals have seen
as the central reason Jesus came, namely, to forgive us of our sins. Yet our problem is not simply that we need to be forgiven of our sins but that we need to be set free from sin.

Jesus did not come during Yom Kippur but during Passover
because as New Testament Scholar N.T. Wright notes, “Jesus’ ministry had a
Passover shape to it.”Think of
the night when Jesus introduced one of the central sacraments of the church –
communion.Jesus does this in the
midst of celebrating the Passover meal with his disciples.In doing this Jesus reconfigured the Passover
meal around his Messianic work. The
bread and the cup were tied in with the symbolism of the very feast which was
being celebrated that week in Jerusalem, a feast which had been celebrated by
the Jews for over a thousand years commemorating how God heard the cries of his
people in slavery and rescued them.Passover speaks of the final decisive miracle God used to break his
people out of slavery.

What then do you think that Jesus might have meant by introducing communion in the midst of a Passover meal just before going to the
cross.I believe the meaning is
pretty simple and pretty profound.In the same way that the blood of a lamb was applied to the doorframes
of the Hebrew people so that judgment and death would pass over so the blood of
Jesus is being symbolically applied to the hearts of his followers as they take
the cup of the New Covenant. A new Passover is about to take place that will be cosmic in its scope.

Does the cup of communion speak of forgiveness of sins?You bet, but so much more than
that.See, it is not just a matter
that each of us has sinned, but we are also born into a world enslaved by
sin.Like the Hebrew slaves in
Egypt we have been born into bondage, born into slavery.We need only to turn on the news or to
see this slavery all around: children growing up in poverty, abuse, addiction,
corporate greed, war, murder and so on.It is everywhere we turn. Sadly it is even within us. We
are both victims of sin and participants in sin.But the good news is that Jesus is the Passover Lamb of God who
takes away not merely the sin of one group of people… but of the world!His blood applied on our hearts, like
the lambs blood of old in that first Passover is the decisive blow to sin and
death.God has heard our cries in
slavery and has answered in mercy and compassion by sending his own son who
took the form of a slave (Philippians 2:6-11) to bust us out of prison!

What was the purpose of the first Passover?

Was it simply so that the Hebrew people could be forgiven of
their sins?

No, it was to set them free so they could begin an Exodus to the Promised Land.This then sheds light on the cross of
Christ.As Paul wrote in Galatians
5:1 “It was for freedom that Christ has set us free.”The cross and the resurrection aren’t simply about forgiving us
of our sins so that we can one day go to heaven when we die, but rather the beginning of a
New Exodus from sin and slavery.

In the first Passover God got his people out of Egypt in one
decisive act but in the Exodus God was getting Egypt out of his
people (this part took a whole lot longer).The Exodus was a time of
miraculous provision in which God began to break that old slavery mindset off
of his people by humbling them and causing them to come to him daily for
provisions (Deuteronomy 8:2-5 ).In the same way, as people of
the New Passover, we have been decisively set free from the slavery of sin, and as
people of the New Exodus, we are being renewed by Jesus Christ, our daily
bread.

The New Exodus is about following not a pillar of fire but
of following King Jesus.It is about
learning to live by a new kind of life that is native to the promised land which
we will one day experience in full.So yes, in Jesus we are forgiven of our sins but more than that we are
set free from the very slavery of sin and we are being formed into a new kind
of people that are not identified by race, gender, nationality or even by the Old
Testament Law but by Jesus, whose blood is upon our hearts.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Below is a video we put together for Vineyard Worship about the story behind the writing of the song Not Be Moved. This song was recorded as the title track for a new Vineyard Worship Album due out in a few weeks. Not Be Moved was recorded in Atlanta a couple of months ago and lead by my good friend and fellow Vineyard worship leader - Diane Theil. She did a great job on the song!

Thanks to David Reece for his mad cinematography skills on shooting and editing this clip.

About Me

About me? Well... I started this blog back in 2005 because I am a bit of an outward processor. I love to wrestle with questions with others. I guess I probably feel like I have something unique to say or contribute through this blog (doesn't every blogger;-) I write here about the things I love: music, movies, theology, family, spirituality and culture and often about how these areas are connected. I am pastor of Northshore Vineyard in Covington, Louisiana. If you are looking for a blog with answers this may not be the place for you, but if you're looking for better questions then you might want to join in a little wrestling! Go ahead and subscribe to the blog before you leave today. You know you want to!